Particular embodiments generally relate to controlled sharing of information.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Whole products are rarely designed entirely by a single company. Instead, companies are increasingly focusing on collaborative product development. In a collaborative product development approach, each company focuses on only its core activity and competence, whilst collaborating with other companies for other activities about the components that make up a product. For example, a number of different part suppliers can design components and collaborate on the way in which these components should be integrated into the overall product. In this scenario, each company works with its own intellectual property, such as the design of a component, but also participates in the assembly of the final product. In such as collaborative product development environment, information dealing with intellectual property rights needs to be shared as well as protected.
To enable collaborative product development, a Virtual Organization (VO) may be established among the collaborating companies. A VO represents a temporary alliance of independent organizations (which may include small, medium, and large organizations) that come together to share skills and resources in order to achieve a common goal.
A VO typically has a number of stages or phases in its life cycle. These stages include:                1. Creation, during which the initiation, recruiting, strategic planning and incubation of the VO takes place,        2. Operation, during which the intensive knowledge exchange process for the different collaboration models in a VO occur,        3. Evolution, during which small changes in roles, membership or operating principles may occur, and        4. Dissolution, which occurs once the objective of the VO has been completed and the VO is dissolved.        
When an enterprise joins a VO, it brings with it knowledge about itself and about collaboration which it has evolved through experience over time. In addition, if a VO is established to support collaborative development, then each member of a VO brings with it information that is part of its core intellectual property (IP) (e.g. design blue prints).
One of the needs for the successful formation and operation of VOs is the need to apply enterprise and VO knowledge in the operational and strategic decision making of VOs. During all the stages of a product or service lifecycle, certain information and knowledge, which may deal with intellectual property, are used to guide the operational and strategic decision making of an organization. For example, in collaborative product development, decisions need to be made on the correct shape and positioning of a component relative to other components. For this purpose, a company designing a certain component may require CAD (Computer Aided Design) data of other components, which were designed by other collaborating companies. An inconsistent or sub-optimal decision making in the product design stage could lead to a sub-optimal design of the final product. This can significantly reduce the competitiveness and profitability of the collaborating organisations.
If a VO model is used for collaborative product development, then the problem of inconsistent or sub-optimal decision making in the product design stage is more acute. That is, each member in a VO will most likely have a local interest. Therefore, decisions taken by members in a VO may be decisions that are only locally optimal, without a complete understanding of the impact of the decisions on the VO as a whole (e.g. without understanding how a decision impacts on the final product developed by the VO). Even if decision making in the VO may take into account the interests of the VO as a whole, such decision making may be nevertheless based upon partial knowledge of the VO capabilities and constraints as a whole. Therefore, the knowledge within a VO may not be fully exploited to inform such strategic and operational decision processes.
During the collaborative design of a product or a component, certain design information (e.g. CAD data), which forms part of a partner's intellectual property (IP), needs to be shared among the partners of the VO. As mentioned previously, collaborating partners may be reluctant to share confidential information, because of concerns related to the unfair exploitation of that information. Different approaches to promote sharing of this sensitive information may be provided, which include controlling of access rights, design model simplification, as well as data watermarking.
Controlling access rights of users to specific IP can be enforced through authentication and authorization. As the level of authentication was stronger, the sensitivity level of the information to with a user had access was increased.
Design model simplification aims to protect confidentiality of design information by providing a design model with different levels of detail. Different levels of detail are available to different users, based on their access rights. Nevertheless, it is difficult to apply a simplified parts model in the collaborative design of products because the topological entities of components are lost during the simplification process.
Lastly, digital data watermarking is also a method that is used in the protection of IP. However, this technique is appropriate for assuring the authenticity of information and also for assuring that the design data retains its original form. Therefore, watermarking does not address the challenge of ensuring information confidentiality in the context of a VO.
Information privacy may also be taken into account. Information privacy may have three dimensions:                Respondent privacy focuses on the prevention of re-identification and disclosure of confidential information of the respondents whose records are released.        User privacy aims to protect the privacy of queries to interactive databases, in order to prevent user profiling and re-identification.        Owner privacy concentrates on ensuring that only the results of a task (e.g. a query), are revealed, without revealing the information that was used to carry out the task.        
In the protection of owner privacy, privacy-preserving data mining and secure multiparty computation may be performed. Privacy-preserving data mining may be appropriate for cases where data mining techniques are performed on data to derive new knowledge. Secure multiparty computation can be used to protect confidentiality of information by allowing computations to be made on sensitive information such that only the result of the computation is revealed, without revealing the sensitive information itself. However, secure multiparty computation requires considerable computation and communication overhead. This makes secure multiparty computation inefficient for large inputs, as, for example, in cases where detailed design information is shared. In addition, sometimes it may be required to actually reveal some of the information of a component's design to ensure that other components (that use or interact with the given component) are designed appropriately. Secure multiparty computation is unable to address this requirement.
Access control may be used to protect information privacy. For example, access control started with Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Discretional Access Control (DAC). Also, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has emerged as an extension of DAC and MAC by emphasizing separation of duties.
Also, a Chinese Wall Security Policy (CWSP) model addresses access control requirements in a commercial environment focusing on conflicts of interest. The concept of a conflict of interest is applicable in a VO where enterprises are exposed to each others' information, especially when sharing information dealing with intellectual property rights. The foundation of the Chinese Wall Security Policy model is that users, enterprises in a VO, are allowed access only to information that is not in conflict with any other information that they already have access to. The CWSP model builds a collection of impassable walls, called Chinese walls, around the data sets of conflicting companies.